TY  - JOUR
AU  - Li, Xiaoli
AU  - Liu, Xiaoyu
AU  - Yin, Cheng
AU  - Collins, Sandra
AU  - Alanazi, Eman
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/4/16
TI  - Impact of a Virtual Reality Video ("A Walk-Through Dementia") on YouTube Users: Topic Modeling Analysis
JO  - JMIR Form Res
SP  - e67755
VL  - 9
KW  - Alzheimer disease
KW  - Alzheimer disease and related dementias
KW  - ADRD
KW  - dementia
KW  - public awareness
KW  - text mining
KW  - older adult
KW  - health care student
KW  - training
KW  - health care professional
KW  - simulation
KW  - digital world
KW  - virtual environment
KW  - virtual tour
KW  - walk-through dementia
KW  - virtual reality
KW  - VR
KW  - VR video
KW  - VR application
KW  - topic modeling
KW  - YouTube
KW  - Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers
KW  - BERT
KW  - social media comments
KW  - experiential learning tool
AB  - Background: Emerging research has highlighted the potential of virtual reality (VR) as a tool for training health care students and professionals in care skills for individuals with Alzheimer disease and related dementias (ADRD). However, there is limited research on the use of VR to engage the general public in raising awareness about ADRD. Objective: This research aimed to examine the impact of the VR video “A Walk-Through Dementia” on YouTube users by analyzing their posts. Methods: We collected 12,754 comments from the VR video series “A Walk-Through Dementia,” which simulates the everyday challenges faced by individuals with ADRD, providing viewers with an immersive experience of the condition. Topic modeling was conducted to gauge viewer opinions and reactions to the videos. A pretrained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model was used to transform the YouTube comments into high-dimensional vector embeddings, allowing for systematic identification and detailed analysis of the principal topics and their thematic structures within the dataset. Results: We identified the top 300 most frequent words in the dataset and categorized them into nouns, verbs, and adjectives or adverbs using a part-of-speech tagging model, fine-tuned for accurate tagging tasks. The topic modeling process identified eight8 initial topics based on the most frequent words. After manually reviewing the 8 topics and the content of the comments, we synthesized them into 5 themes. The predominant theme, represented in 2917 comments, centered on users’ personal experiences with the impact of ADRD on patients and caregivers. The remaining themes were categorized into 4 main areas: positive reactions to the VR videos, challenges faced by individuals with ADRD, the role of caregivers, and learning from the VR videos. Conclusions: Using topic modeling, this study demonstrated that VR applications serve as engaging and experiential learning tools, offering the public a deeper understanding of life with ADRD. Future research should explore additional VR applications on social media, as they hold the potential to reach wider audiences and effectively disseminate knowledge about ADRD. 
SN  - 2561-326X
UR  - https://formative.jmir.org/2025/1/e67755
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2196/67755
DO  - 10.2196/67755
ID  - info:doi/10.2196/67755
ER  -